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The Tampa Tribune

July 7, 2004

Reprinted with permission.

EDITORIAL
An alternative to helplessness

Gov. Jeb Bush last week signed into law changes in the Baker Act designed to help the friends and families of mentally ill people who refuse to acknowledge their illnesses.

The new law will allow judges to intervene when a patient who has a history with the police refuses to take his medications. The judge will have the authority to order him into an outpatient treatment program.

Until this change in the law, a patient had to become an imminent threat to himself or others before he could be committed under the Baker Act. Too often, that stage came too late.

Which is why, since the mid-1980s, 41 other states have adopted laws allowing for involuntary outpatient treatment. Some states, like New York, have used their law to great success. Others, like Alabama, have underused it, and problems persist.

We hope that with the new law on the books, we'll see significant declines in incidences of hospitalization, homelessness, arrest and incarceration. And if the law is used effectively, we will look for numbers like those in New York, where some 63 percent fewer patients were sent to psychiatric hospitals.

Six months after the 1999 implementation of Kendra's Law, named for a woman pushed to her death in front of a subway by a mentally ill man, 75 percent fewer mentally ill people in New York were arrested. Some 69 percent fewer were jailed, and 55 percent fewer experienced homelessness.

There are, of course, some who cannot be helped by involuntary outpatient placement, but if New York's experience proves anything, many more will.

At least now a family has an alternative to helplessness.